why you might ask because and I'll stop doing that the wdtv live is a network
media player and the WD Live Wire is a way to more easily Network your house
now if you want to know what this is I'll say in a nutshell this is power
line Ethernet if you already know what power line Ethernet is you probably
don't need to keep watching unless you really want to know the specifics of the
WD Live Wire so if you don't know what Powerline Ethernet is then stay tuned
and I'm going to explain the whole thing so first of all this is a powerline AV
Network kit so that means you've got up to 200 megabit perss uh data transfer
speeds so you can stream HD you can connect up to eight devices so two
adapters by four ports very cool on the side we see some more
information aha so they're comparing power line versus wi-fi it is faster and
more reliable yeah I'm with them on that one it is immune to interference it is
easy to install and they are both protected by encryption so you've got
two adapters with a total of four ports so that means can connect up to seven
devices and your router all protected with 128bit encryption create high-speed
internet connection anywhere in your home without running wires between rooms
yes that is the beauty of power line so what you do with a power line network
adapter and I'm actually maybe I'll even do like a quick practical demonstration
of this okay we've got an installation CD
which I can't imagine there'd be any use for then we have a technical support
limited warranty guide we have we have WD Live Wire a quick start
guide so step one plug
in step two you Inn aha the CD is just a user
manual yeah that's what I figured Okay so we've got a couple of gigabit
Ethernet cables we have one Live
Wire all right there we go four ports on there as well as a sync button which
I've never actually had to use with any modern power line kit there's an onoff
switch in case you want to turn off your network and there is an important little
bit of instructions you never plug a power line kit into a power bar it can
cause interference you want to plug it directly into the wall although I have
seen them work through Power Bars before I mean for the best results though you
always want to plug them directly into the wall and power line does have some
other limitations as well you do need to be uh some houses have sort of uh half
of the circuits are on one half and half of the circuits are on the other half
and they can't communicate between each other but even if you've got two power
um like two wall plugs that are on separate circuits as long as they're
sort of within that same grouping they'll be able to communicate with each
other so I don't know what wd's done to overcome that uh some of the biggest
problems with power line tend to be uh incompatibility with network adapters or
incompatibility with routers um but with
a product from WD I would be surprised to see any of those issues and I will
test it out a little bit uh hopefully over the well my battery died just in
time for me to suggest testing it so off
camera I've gone and hooked up the Live Wire so I've uh got it running you can
see there's the uh four Ethernet ports on the back of the unit so I've just
plugged into any random one and then I have a wire running to a wall outlet
here in my computer room and going into my gigabit
switch okay and we're going to test its
capabilities by going all the way
downstairs okay High
rocket okay here we go here's my cat
tree so we're way down to the living room where we will find a TV which is
connected to a media PC which is
connected to a WD Live Wire okay and oh
I actually made a mistake and I plugged it in through a power bar but
um in my testing it worked anyway so we're going to fire up Big Buck Bunny
which is a 1080p video
clip a free
one and we're going to demonstrate that it plays 1080p video just
nicely you don't really have to watch the rest of this video because it's just
going to be Big Buck Bunny
here maybe we can skip around to somewhere where there's slightly faster
action so the uh bit rate might be a
little bit
higher anyway Flawless playback on 1080
piece because it is a 200 megabit per second connection um unlike most power
line kits these days which are uh about 100 megabit per second the 200 megabit
per second ones are quite a bit more expensive in most cases but you can see
that it does give you the capability to run full HD
video over power line and I'd imagine we would even get
slightly better performance if we were
using the uh the live wire directly
plugged into the wall you can see skipping around in the video isn't
giving us too much success here but that's okay all right why don't we
actually go do a file transfer now so why don't we take that
file and just copy it right to the desktop
here yeah I guess that's about in line with my
expectations um